Bluetooth Speaker Experience
 

I spent the last week or so trying to get this to work. Finally had a break-thru the other day and finally got it to work last night. It seems to be a few issues with the bluetooth.conf file missing some settings.

Devices:
Bluetooth Dongle IOGear GBU521W6
TV Sound Bar

There were 3 issues I encountered, this may help others:

1) driver error:
bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM20702A1-0a5c-21e8.hcd failed with error -2
Solved by downloading driver fw-0a5c_21e8.hcd then renaming it to the missing file into /lib/firmware/brcm
url to explain it http://plugable.com/2014/06/23/pluga...ssues-on-linux

2) When I tried to run the blueman-applet and manager, the script would blow out with AccessDenied. However, I could run them as root.

Fix: add myself to wheel group, and change the bluetooth.conf owner from user='root' to group='wheel'. Now DBUS works and the applet and manager now load for user when X starts.

3) Although it was loading, the speakers would still not connect. When you'd try, you would get a connect yes/no/yes/no response. Running a dump showed some type of Auth issue, although auth was disabled due a prior error message "Invalid exchange".

Fix: found missing auth options in the bluetooth.conf
For policy group=wheel (former user=root) section, these are needed:
<allow send_interface="org.bluez.PasskeyAgent"/>
<allow receive_interface="org.bluez.PasskeyAgent"/>

For the at_console section, there were several added that made it work. The main one seems to be the method_call.
<allow send_type="method_call"/>
<allow send_destination="org.bluez.Manager"/>
<allow receive_sender="org.bluez.Manager"/>
<allow send_path="/org/bluez"/>
<allow send_destination="org.bluez.Adapter"/>
<allow receive_sender="org.bluez.Adapter"/>
<allow send_destination="org.bluez.Service"/>
<allow receive_sender="org.bluez.Service"/>
<allow send_destination="org.bluez.Database"/>
<allow receive_sender="org.bluez.Database"/>
<allow send_destination="org.bluez.Security"/>
<allow receive_sender="org.bluez.Security"/>
<allow send_destination="org.bluez"/>
<allow receive_sender="org.bluez"/>

After doing that, I rebooted. Then I removed the discovered devices, and then I started bluetoolctl, issued scan on, then pressed the bluetooth button on the sound bar. I heard the tone and saw the device appear, but this time I was asked "Do you authorize connecting? yes/no", I entered yes and the sound bar was now connected.

Now I can toggle the Sound Bar on and play music from the laptop to the TV. It works nice. :)

Although the above now works flawlessly, does any one see any issue with the config changes.

Hopefully this will help others.

Regards

My problem with Bluetooth devices is with iPhones etc. on the street -- the quality tends to be quite bad. I live in New York so there's literally millions of people walking and driving around with such devices and I think they interfere with each other and that causes the problem.

I fixed this issue by simply adding myself to the messagebus group, logging out, and logging back in.

FWIW, my Bluetooth headphones worked out of the box.